Konami

Konami (コナミ) is a Japanese game developer and publisher and has been one of the leading game companies to this day. Konami has been known for their classics such as the Castlevania and Contra series. They are also known for the infamous Konami code which appears in many of their games (Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A) The company employes many workers.

During the NES era, third-party developers were only limited to publishing five games a year. In order to produce more games a year, Konami created Ultra Games.

Contents

Games

Music Development

NES

The music was written in assembly. It is unknown who first created the sound engine, but the version used in most of their NES games was designed by Hidenori Maezawa, and many composers such as Jun Funahashi, Atsushi Fujio and Kouji Murata either tweaked Hidenori's code as needed, or designed their own drivers from scratch. Sometimes the composer would be directly responsible for the in-game arrangements; otherwise, they would just write the music out in sheet form and have a programmer arrange it in-game.

Some Chinese and Taiwanese developers would later use Konami's sound engine (mainly Super Contra, Tiny Toon Adventures and TwinBee 3) such as Ren Yongming from Waixing or Han Ming Liao from Gamtec.